"Thank you very much," returned Boswell through the medium of
the keys, as usual. "I shall not need your bicycle, but this
machine is of great value to me. It has several very remarkable
qualities which I have never found in any other machine. For
instance, singular to relate, Mendelssohn and I were fooling
about here the other night, and when he saw this machine he
thought it was a spinet of some new pattern; so what does he do
but sit down and play me one of his songs without words on it,
and, by jove! when he got through, there was the theme of the
whole thing printed on a sheet of paper before him."

"You don't really mean to say--" I began.

"I'm telling you precisely what happened," said
Boswell. "Mendelssohn was tickled to death with it, and he
played every song without words that he ever wrote, and every
one of 'em was fitted with words which he said absolutely
conveyed the ideas he meant to bring out with the music. Then
I tried the machine, and discovered another curious thing about
it. It's intensely American. I had a story of Alexander Dumas'
about his Musketeers that he wanted translated from French into
American, which is the language we speak below, in preference
to German, French, Volapuk, or English. I thought I'd copy
off a few lines of the French original, and as true as I'm
sitting here before your eyes, where you can't see me, the
copy I got was a good, though rather free, translation. Think
of it! That's an advanced machine for you!"

I looked at the machine wistfully. "I wish I could make it
work," I said; and I tried as before to tap off my name, and